Thursday, 6 August 2015

Doug Johnstone on Writing the Jump

You
get widows and orphans, but why isn’t there a word for a parent who has lost a
child? It’s a question that I pose right at the start of my latest novel, The Jump, and the only answer I can
think of is that it’s just too horrible a thing to contemplate.

The
idea of parents losing a child to suicide has been sitting in the back of my
mind for ages, gnawing away at me. It’s not an easy subject matter to tackle in
a novel, perhaps, but eventually the voices in the back of my mind grew so loud
that I just had to try to write about it. So that’s how The Jump came about.

I
often get a little bit annoyed when crime novels write about suicide because,
more often than not, they turn out not to be about suicide at all. What seems
like suicide in the first instance is usually revealed to be a murder, maybe
the victim of a serial killer. But what if there was no such resolution? That’s
what I wanted to write about, a suicide that was really suicide, and all the emptiness
and loneliness and pain and damage that goes along with that awful act.

The Jump
is not about trying to find out who the murderer is, it’s about trying to come
to terms with loss, and trying to grab a second chance at family life, no
matter how fucked up that might be. And in The
Jump, without giving too much away, it’s pretty fucked up.

Ellie
deals with her grief by making a daily pilgrimage up to the Forth Road Bridge
where her son killed himself. At the start of the book, she encounters another
teenage boy about to do the same thing, and she talks him down. But when she
takes him back to her house, virtually catatonic, she discovers he has blood on
him, blood that isn’t his.

And
so she is swept into this new boy’s mess of a life, all the while doing her
best to protect what’s left of her family and what amounts to a new family.

And,
inevitably, it’s an unholy mess. There are abused children and bad police,
murder and body disposal, alcohol and pills, and a sunken boat. Throughout it
all the road and rail bridges that span the Firth of Forth loom over
everything. The book is set entirely in South Queensferry, the small coastal
town that hunkers between the bridges. The bridges create a specific, eerie
atmosphere, a sense of always being looked down upon, the constant traffic
permanently heading elsewhere. It’s a beautiful place, but the mouth of the
river as it spills into the North Sea is a forbidding place, and nature and the
elements play a large part in what happens as the book reaches its climax.

Ultimately,
The Jump asks questions about
morality and survival. Is it OK to do bad things for a greater good? In a
grieving world where all certainty is gone, what will you do to protect the
innocent? Hopefully, readers of The Jump
will appreciate the way I’ve asked the questions, and will maybe even come up
with their own answers.

The Jump
by Doug Johnstone is out on 6th August (£12.99, Faber & Faber). More information about Doug Johnstone and his work can be found on his blog. You can also follow him from Twitter @doug_johnstone